Four-fifths of viewers watched content from YouTube as 163 million unique US video viewers streamed over 26 billion videos and spent about six hours on average watching online video during May 2012.
Overall, according to Nielsen’s latest investigation of the US online video market, there were 163,478,000 video views taking 26,167,111,000 video streams, an average of 160.1 streams per viewer. Inevitably, YouTube dominated proceedings, amassing 136 million unique viewers during the month, over over three times more than Yahoo! who had 45.336 million users; VEVO with 42 million; AOL, 25.6 million; MSN, 24 million. The highest ranked commercial video service, Hulu, amassed online 15.48 million users.
In terms of total streams, the picture was somewhat different. You Tube took an iron grip with 16.5 billion streams or 121 streams per viewer. Even though Hulu assed a fraction of YouTube’s total streams at 968 million, the OTT service amassed on average 62 streams over the month. That is, unlike YouTube, 62.5 paid for streams.
Next in line was VEVO with 727 million streams, 17 stream per viewer; Yahoo! on 434 million/ 9.6. Hulu’s arch rival Netflix accounted for 300 million total streams and the Dailymotion online video service adding 229.4 and the ESPN Digital Network with 219 million streams.
